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Civil Rights Movement

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Civil Rights Movement Civil Rights Movement From the beginning, race has been at the heart of the deepest divisions in the United States and the greatest challenges to its democratic vision. Africans were brought to the continent in slavery, American Indian nations were subjected to genocidal wars of conquest, northwestern Mexico was invaded and annexed, Asians were imported as laborers then subjected to exclusionary laws. Black historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the history of the 20th Century would be the history of the color line, predicting that anti- colonial movements in Africa and Asia would parallel movements for full civil and political rights for people of color in the United States. During the 1920s and 1930s social scientists worked to replace the predominant biological paradigm of European racial superiority (common in Social Darwinism and eugenics) with the notion of ethnicity -- which suggested that racial minorities could follow the path of white European immigrant groups, assimilating into the American mainstream. Gunnar Myrdal's massive study An American Dilemma in 1944 made the case that the American creed of democracy, equality and justice must be extended to include blacks. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan argued in Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963 for a variation of assimilation based on cultural pluralism, in which various racial and ethnic groups retained some dimension of distinct identity. Following the civil rights movement's victories, neoconservatives began to argue in the 1970s that equal opportunity for individuals should not be interpreted as group rights to be achieved through affirmative action in the sense of preferences or quotas. African Americans. The abolitionist movement used the Civil War to press first for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, freeing slaves in the Confederate States, and then for the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery throughout the United States in 1865. A program of Reconstruction under occupation by the Union army protected the right of freed slaves to vote, and radical governments including black officials took office. The Freedmen's Bureau coordinated efforts to set up schools for blacks and establish a system of free labor for their employment, but efforts at land reform were cut short and a sound economic foundation for free blacks was not achieved. The Panic of 1873 and subsequent depression undercut the economic revival of the South. Bargaining for a majority in the electoral college after the indecisive presidential election of 1876, Republican Rutherford Hays agreed to withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, assuring a return to white supremacy. The Reconstruction era constitutional amendments (the 13th, 14th and 15th) were insufficient by themselves to guarantee the protection of rights to Southern blacks. Independent black institutions -- churches, clubs, benevolent societies, schools -- survived, but gains in civil rights were rolled back after 1877 as the "Jim Crow" system of legal segregation was tightened in the South. Mob rule was commonplace; there were 4,742 documented cases of lynchings in the United States between 1882 and 1964 -- 3,445 blacks and 1,297 whites (most of the whites were lynched before 1900). Lynchings didn't drop below 10 per year until 1936. The Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 endorsed "separate but equal" as the legal basis of segregation. Two contrasting approaches to black development were advanced by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) and W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963). Washington advocated uplift of Negroes through education and industrial training, acknowledging the strength of systematic segregation by avoiding efforts for political and social equality in the South. Washington interested Northern white philanthropists in supporting his programs, including Tuskeege Institute, and appealed to the Southern planter-industrialist class to see common interests in preparing blacks to work in Southern industry. Washington's ideas influenced the founders of the National Urban League (NUL) in 1910, established to provide assistance to blacks in Northern cities, and would find echoes in later movements for black separatism and black nationalism -- including the rapid rise and fall of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s and both Leftist nationalist and black Muslim movements from the mid-1960s forward. DuBois rejected accommodation and urged protest and agitation for political and social equality. In 1905 he organized the Niagara Movement to restore black Americans' political and civil rights, under attack since the end of Reconstruction, and counter the vocational self-help programs of Booker T. Washington with a movement for equal rights. DuBois was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, the first editor of its magazine The Crisis, and organizer of the first Pan-African Congress in 1919. Both the NAACP and the NUL were creations of the progressive era. The progressive white co-founders of the NAACP and the NUL, living primarily in New York, were often from families with an abolitionist background. Many would become prominent leaders of other progressive era organizations, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Civil Liberties Union. To an extent, the NAACP and NUL reflected political and economic alternatives, but they also represented a division of labor within a broader vision of political, social, and economic equality -- the NAACP emphasizing political agitation and legal action for racial equality, and the NUL emphasizing employment opportunities. The NUL not only promoted vocational guidance and training, it strongly supported an end to employment discrimination. For the first half of the 20th Century, the primary vehicle for the continuing black freedom movement was the NAACP, which conducted a three-decade campaign against lynching and began the legal work that would culminate in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1955 that overturned Plessy's "separate but equal" doctrine and set the stage for the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s. The vast migration of nearly 5 million African-Americans from the South to the North and West between 1910 and 1960 opened a new window of political opportunity for the civil rights movement. Blacks went from being non-voters in the South to voters in the North, and under the influence of Roosevelt's New Deal began to switch allegiance from the Republicans to the Democrats with the election of 1936. Reflecting this growing political influence, A. Philip Randolph (a socialist and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) brought together several black civil rights groups in his March on Washington Movement in 1940. The threat of the march prompted Roosevelt to issue Executive Order No. 8802 in June 1941, banning discrimination in defense industries and in government, and also setting up a Fair Employment Practices Committee – just in time to open up defense industry jobs to blacks during World War II. After the war, Randolph saw an opportunity to end segregation in the military itself. He threatened to lead a movement among blacks to refuse military service, angering President Harry Truman but convincing him to issue Executive Order 9981, ending segregation in the armed services. Black voters subsequently made the difference in several key states -- including Illinois, Ohio and California -- for Truman's upset victory in the presidential election of 1948. Following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown in 1954, the border South states began desegregating school systems, but the deep South waited to see what the federal government would do about enforcing the ruling. The civil rights movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott, initiated when Rosa Parks was arrested for not surrendering her seat to a white passenger. Parks had been a state and local NAACP leader for several years, and had recently attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School where participants discussed what they could do to foster change in their communities. Her associate in the Montgomery NAACP, E.D. Nixon (a sleeping car porter and member of Randolph's union) helped mobilize local ministers while Jo Anne Robinson, president of the Women’s Political Council and teacher at Alabama State College, mimeographed leaflets calling for a boycott. Local ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, and selected newcomer Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as president. The year-long bus boycott ended only when in November 1956 the Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the federal district court in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s law on racial segregation in busses was unconstitutional. This victory sparked the organization in 1957 of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an association of ministers committed to furthering the civil rights movement. In the fall of 1957 the attention of the world was drawn to the effort to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates led the legal strategy resulting in nine black students entering the school, protected from mobs by federal troops dispatched by President Dwight Eisenhower. Tactics for the next stage of the movement were being developed by James Lawson and Glenn Smiley, two ministers on the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who began working with King and the SCLC in 1958 to conduct workshops on nonviolent direct action. Independently of each other, groups of black college students in Greensboro and Nashville began lunch-counter sit-ins in early 1960, and the movement spread quickly. The SCLC's staffer Ella Baker called a meeting of students involved in the sit-ins, and some 300 showed up at Shaw University in Raleigh over Eastern weekend in 1960, and ended up forming an independent organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The three legs of the civil rights movement in the South were the local NAACP chapter network, the black churches, and the black colleges. Each had its own organizational form -- the NAACP, the SCLC, and SNCC.
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